“Your First Colleague Might Be an AI”: Bridging Functional Value and Affective Trust for Theorizing AI Avatars in New-Employee Organizational Socialization

Organizational socialization increasingly occurs in contexts where AI-powered avatars support onboarding, yet how newcomers evaluate these agents remains underexplored. Drawing on meta-UTAUT, organizational socialization literature, and human-AI communication, this study develops a dual-path trust model for AI onboarding avatars. We theorize a functional pathway, where performance and effort beliefs foster cognitive trust, and a socioemotional pathway, where social presence cues build affective trust. A vignette-based survey of 272 new employees (tenure <12 months) from diverse industries in China was conducted. Structural equation modeling and regression analyses revealed that perceived usefulness and ease of use drive acceptance primarily through cognitive trust, whereas social presence exerts a strong indirect effect via affective trust. Affective trust becomes a stronger predictor when perceived risk is high and among newcomers at later socialization stages. These findings characterize AI avatars as dual-route trust agents, offering guidance for aligning avatar deployment with task risks and socialization timing.